In an important moment for science and data transparency, @thelancet announces that its 96,000 observational study on hydroxychloroquine has been RETRACTED.

Jeremy Faust MD MS
@jeremyfaust
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Statement from The Lancet
Today, three of the authors of the paper, “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis”, have retracted their study. They were unable to complete an independent audit of the data underpinning their analysis. As a result, they have concluded that they “can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources.” The Lancet takes issues of scientific integrity extremely seriously, and there are many outstanding questions about Surgisphere and the data that were allegedly included in this study. Following guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), institutional reviews of Surgisphere’s research collaborations are urgently needed.

The retraction notice is published today, June 4, 2020. The article will be updated to reflect this retraction shortly.

Today, three of the authors of the paper, “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis”, have retracted their study. They were unable to complete an independent audit of the data underpinning their analysis. As a result,….

Forbes: 42% of all COVID-19 deaths are taking place in facilities that house 0.62% of the U.S. population.

And 42% could be an undercount. States like New York exclude from their nursing home death tallies those who die in a hospital, even if they were originally infected in an assisted living facility. Outside of New York, more than half of all deaths from COVID-19 are of residents in long-term care facilities.

Instead, states like New York, New Jersey, and Michigan actually ordered nursing homes to accept patients with active COVID-19 infections who were being discharged from hospitals.

The most charitable interpretation of these orders is that they were designed to ensure that states would not overcrowd their ICUs. But well after hospitalizations peaked, governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo were doubling down on their mandates.

As recently as April 23, Cuomo declared that nursing homes “don’t have a right to object” to accepting elderly patients with active COVID infections. “That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that.” Only on May 10—after the deaths of nearly 3,000 New York residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities—did Cuomo stand down and partially rescind his order.

Don’t believe the media HYPE. Cov-19 daily cases and deaths are going DOWN, not UP. The numbers have fallen dramatically since May 1.

The total number of tests have risen from 6 million on May 1 to nearly 15 million on May 26, yet the number of new daily cases have declined . The MSM won’t tell you that as they keep screaming for more tests.

On May 6, the 7-day moving average of deaths was 1878.

On May 26, the 7-day moving average of deaths was 1007.

The numbers are inflated due to the inclusion of other diseases (comorbidity).

In the 5/20 Quinnipiac poll, 1,323 self-identified registered voters were surveyed nationwide from May 14 – 18 with a margin of error of +/- 2.7 percentage points.

BUT THE POLL DOES NOT PROVIDE A PARTY ID. WHY NOT?

These steps calculate a plausible adjusted poll:
1. Note that the 2016 National Exit Poll (NEP) was forced to match the fraudulent 2016 recorded vote by over-weighting the Dems Party-ID and vote shares. This is Standard Operating Procedure used by the MSM to rig polls.

2. Calculate the Quinnipiac party ID mix required to match the bogus 50-39% margin. As usual, Party-ID and vote shares were over-weighted to favor the Dems.

3. Calculate the adjusted Biden/Trump poll. Apply the latest Gallup national voter affiliation percentages and make plausible adjustments to the Quinnipiac poll shares.

“In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States. The flu spread from Hong Kong to the United States, arriving in December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide.

Lifespan in the US in those days was 70 whereas it is 78 today. Population was 200 million as compared with 328 million today. It was also a healthier population with low obesity. If it would be possible to extrapolate the death data based on population and demographics, we might be looking at a quarter million deaths today from this virus. So in terms of lethality, it was as deadly and scary as COVID-19 if not more so, though we shall have to wait to see.

Schools mostly stayed open. Businesses did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants”.

Probabilities of clinical success using hydroxychloroquine with or without azithromycin +/- zinc against the novel betacoronavirus, SARS-CoV-2

Based on the current clinical information available, the success rates for a favorable outcome/clinical improvement are approximately 91.6% using hydroxychloroquine(HCQ) without or without azithromycin (AZ) and/or zinc and the death rate in this treated group is approximately 2.7%.

Please note that the Veteran’s Administration study conducted by Magagnoli J, Narendran S, Pereira F, et al. in South Carolina assessed a very sick population and the hydroxychloroquine was given late the course of the illness. Many patients were ventilated. We believe the 52 deaths reported in this population are not indicative or predictive of the average death rate observed in populations diagnosed in the early to mid stage of the CoVID-19 disease and treated with hydroxychloroquine. Based on the experienced clinicians observational data summarized above, the death count was only 11 out of over 2,000 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine.

Dr. Stephen Smith’s patients who were treated with HCQ and azithromycin did not require mechanical ventilation. He reports that severely ill CoVID-19 patients under 70 yrs of age were diabetic or prediabetic with high BMI.
He is convinced hydroxychloroquine works for his patients. His level of certainty is very high. – personally reported on 4.2.20 and again on subsequent dates in April 2020.

Clinicians are natural Bayesians and such philosophical and qualitative statistical analysis is consistent with our medical training, bedside clinical skills including history taking, examination, differential diagnosis, probable primary diagnosis, laboratory evaluations including serologies, EKG, chest X-ray, CT scan of lungs, objective gold standard test interpretation and clinical decision making. In other words, waiting for fixed randomized controlled trials during a pandemic when time is of the essence, a Bayesian approach to the assessment of diagnostic and therapeutic probabilities is wise and efficient and will save time, money and lives if the physicians are given a chance to retain their autonomy and practice medicine to the best of their abilities.

A powerful article from realclearinvestigations:
“Similarly, in the face of the Mueller Report’s finding last year of no Trump-Russia collusion, the Times is not giving back the 2018 Pulitzer Prize it won with the Washington Post for coverage that uncritically pushed the conspiracy theories of anti-Trump intelligence sources. (Nor is the Post.) As it withholds from its readers any detailed explanation of its relationship with a vital source of its misleading coverage – Fusion GPS, producer of the discredited Steele dossier at the heart of the affair – the Times continues to publish the spin of intelligence sources trying to discredit or at least blunt continuing federal inquiries into what happened.

New York Times/Wikimedia

The Trump-Russia coverage, even with caveats pinning assertions to sources rather than solid evidence, clearly created a false impression that Donald Trump and his team were in cahoots with the Russians. It’s hard to believe that former Times Executive Editor Max Frankel would have written an op-ed for the paper declaring that an “obvious bargain [was] reached during the campaign of 2016” between the Trump campaign and Russia if he hadn’t read those unmistakable insinuations in the Times. The Trump campaign is suing the Times for libel over Frankel’s claims. (Full disclosure: I was hired as an editor at the Times in 1988 under Frankel.)

A fuller accounting by the Times is especially necessary because the media’s pushing of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories was central to an unprecedented and possibly criminal effort to subvert or remove a president under false pretenses. Unless the Times and other sources come clean about who was feeding them misleading and partisan information, we may never understand this momentous chapter of history”.